Earlier this week Red Sox season-ticket holder Mitt Romney gave a national network interview at Fenway Park. This led someone to bring to my attention that Romney, who was governor at the time, was there at Fenway Park for the historic championship-clinching Game 4 of the 2004 World Series. Or at least, he told an Air Force pilot he was:

“When he told me he was Massachusett’s governor, I politely asked him to leave the flight deck, declaring the cockpit off limits to all Red Sox fans. He laughed and made a few cracks my way, regarding the Yanks, and we hit it off pretty well. I asked him if he was at Fenway when the Sox finally won the World Series, and with a huge boyish grin he replied, ‘Yes I was.'”

No, he wasn’t. I could go to a lot of trouble proving to you that Romney was actually in New Hampshire campaigning for George W. Bush that day, but it doesn’t really matter because — as every New Englander has been screaming while reading this post — Game 4 was played at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri.

I will leave it to others to decide for themselves how grievous an offense it is to misrepresent your presence at what was, inarguably, the single greatest moment the Commonwealth experienced during his four years as governor. I mean, sure, every single one of his constituents at the time can tell you, until their dying breath, exactly where they were at that glorious moment. But I’m not looking to judge.

I do want to use this anecdote to explain something about Mitt Romney’s long history of untruthfulness: that it must be understood as at least two distinct types of lies.

One is what I think of as the “branding” lie — the carefully crafted, deliberate fabrication designed to enhance the image of the product known as “Mitt Romney.”

The other, which includes the one to the Air Force pilot, is what I would call the “Zelig” lie. If you haven’t seen the brilliant Woody Allen film, Zelig is so desperate to fit in, he physically transforms to match the people he is around at a given time.

Personally, I was at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri that night — unquestionably one of the greatest in my life and the history of the City of Boston and Commonwealth of Massachusetts — and I didn’t see Romney there, either.